Top 100 Vivienne Westwood Quotes
#1. I'm not terribly interested in beauty. What touches me is someone who understands herself.
Vivienne Westwood
#2. My clothes have a story. They have an identity. They have a character and a purpose. That's why they become classics. Because they keep on telling a story. They are still telling it.
Vivienne Westwood
#3. I have been asked what would I ban immediately if I could. Advertising.
Vivienne Westwood
#4. The hippie movement politicized my generation. When it ended, we all started looking back at our own history, looking, in my case, for motives of rebellion.
Vivienne Westwood
#5. I have a company, and I've got to think about that. I'm trying to do my best there, and that's a much harder task. We recycle as much as possible, and we conserve. But I've always been one to save everything - I even walk up stairs on the very inside or the very outside to not wear out the tread.
Vivienne Westwood
#6. I wish you didn't have to design so often. Try to do quality and cut down on quantity. I think fashion is very, very important.
Vivienne Westwood
#8. Fashion is life-enhancing and I think it's a lovely, generous thing to do for other people
Vivienne Westwood
#10. I do think we're an endangered species. But that we do have a plan to save the rainforest.
Vivienne Westwood
#11. In Italy they take cheap cloth and make it look expensive, but I take expensive cloth and make it look cheap. They just don't understand.
Vivienne Westwood
#12. I eat only vegetables and fruit, and to me it's the most aspirational diet because it's so easy. It's quite simple, the cooking I do.
Vivienne Westwood
#13. There is no hierarchy of values any more. Real progress is due mainly to human genius, and that's rare, and usually stems from a real elite, from a hierarchy.
Vivienne Westwood
#14. I think dress, hairstyle and make-up are the crucial factors in projecting an attractive persona and give one the chance to enhance one's best physical features.
Vivienne Westwood
#15. The age in which we live, this non-stop distraction, is making it more impossible for the young generation to ever have the curiosity or discipline ... because you need to be alone to find out anything.
Vivienne Westwood
#16. We moved into the back, made it into a little 50s sitting room and started to sell the records. We had an immediate success. For one thing, these Teddy Boys were thrilled to buy the records.
Vivienne Westwood
#17. I always thought we had an environmental problem, but I hadn't realized how urgent it was. James Lovelock writes that by the end of this century there will be one billion people left.
Vivienne Westwood
#18. I don't feel comfortable defending my clothes. But if you've got the money to afford them, then buy something from me. Just don't buy too much.
Vivienne Westwood
#20. The reason why I am proud of my part in the punk movement is that I think it really did implant a message that was already there. The hippies told it to me, but punk made it something cool for people to stand up for, which is that we do not believe government, that we are against government.
Vivienne Westwood
#21. I don't have space to enter into the examples or the history of this, so I'm left with having to make the bold statement that culture is extinct.
Vivienne Westwood
#23. Popular culture is a contradiction in terms. If it's popular, it's not culture.
Vivienne Westwood
#25. There's this idea that somehow you've got to keep changing things, and as often as possible. Maybe if people just decided not to buy anything for a while, they'd get a chance to think about what they wanted; what they really liked.
Vivienne Westwood
#26. The arts have only ever interested a small minority of people, which acted as a kind of nursery to support artists.
Vivienne Westwood
#27. I'll tell you what I was like as a child. I was a good person. I was high-spirited but I was a big reader.
Vivienne Westwood
#28. My biggest criticism is how can people be so easily satisfied? Even people with talent.
Vivienne Westwood
#29. The bravery shown by Azza Suleiman who dared to stand up for another woman who was being beaten, and paid a heavy price in doing so, is both awe-inspiring and humbling.
Vivienne Westwood
#30. Shoes must have very high heels and platforms to put women's beauty on a pedestal.
Vivienne Westwood
#31. The main message we want to get out there is that climate change is caused by the rotten economic system.
Vivienne Westwood
#32. I have always loved the Mao cap, though I hate violent revolution.
Vivienne Westwood
#33. Everybody should have a fair deal; everybody should have the chance to life in this world. If we were evolved as human beings, we would hopefully be able to alleviate suffering in the world.
Vivienne Westwood
#34. The muscular, athletic type is not representative of the human race, who are varied in their physique.
Vivienne Westwood
#35. I used to always fight for human rights. I still fight for Leonard Peltier, who's spent 35 years in jail for a crime he didn't commit.
Vivienne Westwood
#36. If you ask me what I think people should be getting next season, I'll tell you what I'd like them to buy - nothing. I'd like people to stop buying and buying and buying.
Vivienne Westwood
#38. Every time I have to look up a word in the dictionary, I'm delighted.
Vivienne Westwood
#39. Liverpool people are famous for liking clothes and fashion; they are very social and lively people, and we know that they like clothes.
Vivienne Westwood
#41. My fashion advice is to have a flattering mirror and then forget about it.
Vivienne Westwood
#42. I've got a real sense of three-dimensional geometry. I can look at a flat piece of fabric and know that if I put a slit in it and make some fabric travel around a square, then when you lift it up it will drape in a certain way, and I can feel how that will happen.
Vivienne Westwood
#43. I very rarely watch my own fashion shows, but the makeup for my Fall 2011 show was just brilliant.
Vivienne Westwood
#44. I am attracted to people who make this effort in knowing what suits them - they are individual and stylish.
Vivienne Westwood
#47. If Mrs Merkel wants to wear Westwood, I can promise that I will design clothes for her that will make her look chic, refined and influential.
Vivienne Westwood
#50. I've always felt heroic about my life ... As a child, I remember little girls in the playground moaning about how boys could do more than they could. I didn't think that was the case at all. My parents didn't treat me as a girl.
Vivienne Westwood
#51. We wanted to step off our island and add the color of the third world. We got gold cigarette paper and stuck it around our teeth. We really did look like pirates and dressed to look the part.
Vivienne Westwood
#52. I'd like to be the last person alive in the world! Yes, I'd like to know what happens.
Vivienne Westwood
#53. Wear a towel instead of a coat, it's very chic. Or your husband's boxer shorts with a belt, or something from your grandmother. It's all about do-it-yourself at the moment.
Vivienne Westwood
#54. I think some people would love to be able to make the clothes I make - and of course, I do influence them, but they keep simplifying, and minimalism doesn't quite work.
Vivienne Westwood
#56. I don't think punk fashion is a specter or overemphasized - it made a big impression, as there had never been anything like it before.
Vivienne Westwood
#57. Buy less. Choose well. Make it last. Quality, not quantity. Everybody's buying far too many clothes.
Vivienne Westwood
#58. The young Japanese, especially, love to wear the latest thing and when they come to London they head for my shops as part of what they want to find in Britain.
Vivienne Westwood
#59. Every time I hear that word, I cringe. Fun! I think it's disgusting; it's just running around. It's not my idea of pleasure.
Vivienne Westwood
#60. Real art has been ... what's the word? Kidnapped? No, that's not it. But, OK, kidnapped by business.
Vivienne Westwood
#61. It is not possible for a man to be elegant without a touch of femininity.
Vivienne Westwood
#62. When we started to do punk, we put all of these things together to create the look of an urban guerrilla - a rebel.
Vivienne Westwood
#63. I've always had my own access to the public, because I started off making my clothes for a little shop, and so I've always had people buying them. I could always sell a few, even if I couldn't sell a lot, and somehow my business grew because people happened to like it. I'm in a fortunate position.
Vivienne Westwood
#64. More people should read books. It's the most concentrated experience you can have.
Vivienne Westwood
#65. When I'm in the street, the only people I notice are usually at least 70 years old, because they look really stylish.
Vivienne Westwood
#67. I tend not to like an awful lot of what is going out under my name now because it is just all product. Who needs it?
Vivienne Westwood
#68. I didn't know how a working-class girl like me could possibly make a living in the art world
Vivienne Westwood
#69. The best night of my life was watching the Japanese Noh theater. I've only seen it once, but even saying it now, I think, 'How can I ever have this experience again?' It was so mesmerizing, so complicated and so primordial; I could not believe it.
Vivienne Westwood
#70. Prince Charles is definitely my hero; he uses his position to do only good in this world.
Vivienne Westwood
#72. I'm different from any other designer, businesswise, in that I've built this company up and I own it. I never had business hype behind me to promote my image ... My image is real ... I have never had marketing people telling me what to do.
Vivienne Westwood
#74. In the 18th century, if women wanted to travel and they dressed as a man, people would not look twice. Your clothes said everything. Also there were masters and servants swapping clothes. You could be anything, your clothes told everything!
Vivienne Westwood
#75. I was still interested in the youth rebellion but never-the-less I stopped being a victim. Stopped trying to attack the establishment realizing that it takes too much of your energy.
Vivienne Westwood
#76. A status symbol is a book. A very easy book to read is The Catcher in the Rye. Walk around with that under your arm, kids. That is status.
Vivienne Westwood
#77. The only possible effect one can have on the world is through unpopular ideas.
Vivienne Westwood
#78. Sometimes you need to transport your idea to an empty landscape and then populate it with fantastic looking people.
Vivienne Westwood
#79. Fashion is here to help make people look very important. If they have good taste and choose what suits them, I give them options on how they can do that. It's always sexy, and it's always with the same result: making women look fantastic.
Vivienne Westwood
#80. However, because Britain is young and exciting, I did show my second line here once or twice.
Vivienne Westwood
#83. Everybody looks like clones and the only people you notice are my age. I don't notice anybody unless they look great, and every now and again they do, and they are usually 70.
Vivienne Westwood
#84. The only reason I'm in fashion is to destroy the word conformity.
Vivienne Westwood
#85. If you wear clothes that don't suit you, you're a fashion victim. You have to wear clothes that make you look better.
Vivienne Westwood
#86. The thing that makes my clothes really different is that, number one, they are really great designs; they're not tacky; they are very professional; the design is made from lots of decisions.
Vivienne Westwood
#87. I always tried to do things by example, even though I was not a very good mother regarding routines and family life.
Vivienne Westwood
#88. There is a real connection between culture and climate change. We all have a part to play and if you engage with life, you will get a new set of values, get off the consumer treadmill, and start to think, and it is these great thinkers who will rescue the planet.
Vivienne Westwood
#89. My son has followed fashion since he was a punk. He and I agree that fashion is about sex.
Vivienne Westwood
#90. I design things to help people to hopefully express their personality.
Vivienne Westwood
#91. If you see everything from the point of view of women being victims in some way, you don't see the wood for the trees. It is better to be a person than a woman.
Vivienne Westwood
#92. If we didn't have the Chinese buying things, we'd be on the floor.
Vivienne Westwood
#93. Our economic system, run for profit and waste and based primarily on the extractive industries, is the cause of climate change. We have wasted the earth's treasure and we can no longer exploit it cheaply.
Vivienne Westwood
#94. I think that feminists have definitely underestimated the role that women have had historically. I think I would be insecure if I were to be a man; there's so much pressure on you.
Vivienne Westwood
#96. I urge everyone to be trendsetters for Azza Suleiman. Let's make it one fashion which everyone will want to follow.
Vivienne Westwood
#97. To me, reading a fashion magazine is the last thing I need to do. I've got books I need to read.
Vivienne Westwood
#98. I remember reading a book set in the future, it was written in the 1870s projecting to 1920, and this time traveler said you couldn't tell the difference between men and women. He saw what was coming.
Vivienne Westwood
#99. I am always trying to find fabrics that are more friendly to the environment - working with Virgin Atlantic, they managed to research into this and find more eco fabrics.
Vivienne Westwood
#100. What changed our lives forever was when Malcolm had the idea to sell rock 'n roll records to trendy customers.
Vivienne Westwood
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